Back in April, I took a futuristic look back as the price of gasoline from the vantage point of April 2009.  The point was to suggest how the price of a gallon of gas got to $7.33.  In that post, I wrote:

“July 2006 There was general outrage at the pump and on the airwaves, when Americans hit the road for the July 4th weekend paying an average of $3.60 a gallon. The Bush administration tried to channel this anger into getting public opinion around opening up Alaska and other places for the drilling of oil. It was reported that major auto dealerships had an average of a five month supply of SUVs and large pick-up trucks on their lots, the greatest inventory backlog ever.”

Fortunately for all our pocketbooks I was wrong on the high side.  According to the United States Department of Energy, the national average price for a gallon of regular was $2.93 for the July 4th weekend.  In a number of states the average price was over $3.00, with California being the highest at $3.19.  In Chicago where I live, the price in the city seemed to be around $3.20 for regular and  $3.35 - $3.49 for high octane.  All of these numbers are roughly $.75 more per gallon than a year ago, or roughly an increase of 30%, which is a huge one year jump.

The other part of the prediction seems to be close to the truth.  It is impossible to see a newspaper, or watch …

Across the full spectrum of human endeavor, it is often hard to see what the future might be. Trend lines can be seen, and directions understood, but specific pictures of the future can be vague.  However, our future shows up most clearly in the area of technology.  Technology lets us see new potential.  It shows us new tools that may or may not become universally useful but provides us with possibilities to expect.

There were a couple of articles recently about technology that gave me a clear view of living in the future. The first was about a new flash drive, the second about microchip research.

In the past year or two, portable flash drives have become ubiquitous. The flash drive is one of those tech items that make life easier and changes behavior.  When going to a client’s office for a presentation, or when taking work home from the office, or just choosing to travel light, flash drives freed us from carrying lap-tops or burning and carrying DVDs.  Just drag the presentation or work to the flash drive, put it in your pocket and away you go.  Initially offering 64 and 128mbs of storage, one can now routinely buy 1 gigabyte for the same price.  This means that we can now carry more storage in our pocket than was in a PC 20 years ago.

The article that made me see the future was one about the new flash drives coming on the market this month that, in addition to storage, also …